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So, if I'm interpreting the downvotes correctly: Newspapers with emotive articles about not having space for the bodies: reliable & obviously true European Un

• bad_user 7y ago
  Covid-2019 has made 35,000 victims globally, out of which 10,000 just in Italy, just in one month, victims happening in spite of massive movement restrictions happening on a never before seen scale and it's been pretty clear already that this isn't "just a flu". On the other hand the numbers are too small so they currently don't make a dent in the overall statistics, however this is a problem of potential and every single prediction thus far came true, with the news being all bad. The disease is scary not only due to mortality rate, but due to hospitalization rate too and in terms of hospitalization, there's not much difference between the young and healthy and the old or sick. When 10% of those infected require medical assistance, this will cripple your economy regardless of fatally. Plus if the medical system is collapsing, the median age will go down, since the young and healthy won't necessarily get the needed ICU beds. There's also the small matter of the population not having any immunity to this virus (compared with Influenza) which guarantees that if unchecked it will spread to 70% of the population at least. 70% spread, with a 0.5% mortality rate (an optimistic estimate) means 1,560,422 dead just in the EU and this in the ideal case in which everybody gets treated, otherwise that rate can easily be double or triple. Or 27,000,000 worldwide. Such a number is comparable with the victims of World War I. You're being down-voted because of downplaying the severity of this disease, when the writing is on the wall — the Italians downplayed this too and now their hospitals are overwhelmed. Of course, a discussion of where this is headed and what can we do to avoid a severe economic depression is worth having, but let's not downplay how bad this is.
  • _-___________-_ 7y ago
    Note that I never said this was "just a flu". The baseline mortality rate in Italy is about 50,000 deaths per month, and that's averaged over the year -- it's considerably higher from November to April. The concern should be about additional deaths, not the raw numbers of "how many people died after testing positive for Covid-19" -- which, it's worth noting, is the metric being measured here, not "deaths exclusively caused by Covid-19". We don't treat any other respiratory illness this way. If we applied the same logic to other respiratory illnesses (flu appears to be a trigger word these days, but it's the big one!) then a very large number of deaths we currently attribute to other things (cancer & heart disease to name two huge ones) would suddenly become "flu deaths". (edited: I had an extra zero on the baseline mortality rate due to a calculation error)
    • deleted 7y ago
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    • gadders 7y ago
      This is the same as in the UK currently. If you have, say, terminal cancer but it is a dose of flu that finally kills you, the death is recorded as due to cancer. If you have terminal cancer but you die due to Corona, then it is listed as Corona that kills you [1] "But there’s another, potentially even more serious problem: the way that deaths are recorded. If someone dies of a respiratory infection in the UK, the specific cause of the infection is not usually recorded, unless the illness is a rare ‘notifiable disease’. So the vast majority of respiratory deaths in the UK are recorded as bronchopneumonia, pneumonia, old age or a similar designation. We don’t really test for flu, or other seasonal infections. If the patient has, say, cancer, motor neurone disease or another serious disease, this will be recorded as the cause of death, even if the final illness was a respiratory infection. This means UK certifications normally under-record deaths due to respiratory infections. Now look at what has happened since the emergence of Covid-19. The list of notifiable diseases has been updated. This list — as well as containing smallpox (which has been extinct for many years) and conditions such as anthrax, brucellosis, plague and rabies (which most UK doctors will never see in their entire careers) — has now been amended to include Covid-19. But not flu. That means every positive test for Covid-19 must be notified, in a way that it just would not be for flu or most other infections." [1] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19...
      • bad_user 7y ago
        > "If you have terminal cancer but you die due to Corona, then it is listed as Corona that kills you [1]" If you die because you have Covid-2019 and your lungs get filled with liquid, then it's definitely Covid-2019 that kills you, not the cancer. And how many people have terminal cancer right now? I find this narrative particularly dangerous, because the chronic diseases that have been associated with Covid-2019 mortality, like cardiovascular disease or diabetes, are very much manageable with proper treatment. Yet the narrative is that these people are dying anyway, even if they might be having decades of productive life in them. So the narrative is not only inhumane, it's also bullshit.
• yread 7y ago
  Maybe you're getting downvoted because your own source advises against being used as a source for your argument? From euromomo: > Note concerning COVID-19 related mortality as part of the all-cause mortality figures reported by EuroMOMO > Over the past few days, the EuroMOMO hub has received many questions about the weekly all-cause mortality data and the possible contribution of any COVID-19 related mortality. Some wonder why no increased mortality is observed in the reported mortality figures for the COVID-19 affected countries. > The answer is that increased mortality that may occur primarily at subnational level or within smaller focal areas, and/or concentrated within smaller age groups, may not be detectable at the national level, even more so not in the pooled analysis at European level, given the large total population denominator. Furthermore, there is always a few weeks of delay in death registration and reporting. Hence, the EuroMOMO mortality figures for the most recent weeks must be interpreted with some caution. > Therefore, although increased mortality may not be immediately observable in the EuroMOMO figures, this does not mean that increased mortality does not occur in some areas or in some age groups, including mortality related to COVID-19. EDIT: you can even see COVID19 deaths btw - if you scroll down to Italy there is an uptick. If Lombardy was there separately the uptick would be even bigger - the disease kills almost 3 times the number of people who die on an average day